Personal Smartphones Are Cool, Great for Games and Insecure: Use A VPN

You love your smartphone. The memo just came through from legal and the IT department that you don’t have to use the company smartphone, instead you can use whatever smartphone you want.

The problem with this approach, for companies, is that out of the box, these devices are quite insecure.

When your employees connect to your corporate network, from their smartphones, the best way to ensure they’re secure is to enable them to use a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt data as it goes from their smartphones to the corporate network, over the public Internet.

What you can do is configure your servers with a VPN and provide a VPN client to your mobile (notebook and smartphone) users.

Security vendor SonicWall released a new product with this in mind. This new product, Mobile Connect, is a unified client Apple app for iOS and provides Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users full network-level access to corporate, academic or other organizational resources over encrypted SSL VPN connections to provide confidentiality and data integrity for users outside of the corporate network when they are traveling and using hot spots.

While you want to give freedom to your users to use any device, it’s important that corporate data and your corporate network are not compromised.

A SoniceWall representative told me that some companies will use Salesforce.com for their CRM system, but still leverage Agile or Oracle systems that reside on the corporate network or in a datacenter location, in order to access these systems remotely companies will deploy SSL VPN technology to provide secure access. Additionally using SSL VPN technology companies can grant different levels of access to corporate resources depending on if they’re an employee, contractor or business partner.